Here's how it went on the ground at Manila. Notice that I have lots of units resting in an adjacent hex ( 1 hex NE ). I'm sure that some of them are ready to put back into the meat grinder......I'm going to start some DA's as soon as the 38th Division arrives. About 2 days.

4 of my vessels, 3 subs and a cruiser, have had their Float Plane shot down or Ops Losses or something. I have to make a mental note to check the ships that come into port so I can swap out their search plane unit for one that has one.

I thought I was up against a group of capital ships and it turns out that it was a squadron of those new BB decoys the Allies are coming out with. We don't want to let the Allies we know their decoys don't work so we're labeling the ships as ML's in the reports. They keep pumping them out and we'll keep sinking them. So far so good. I'm guessing Jim has pulled his combatants back toward the Ceylon direction or maybe someplace along the Indian coast.

I think maybe I should leave Baker Island alone from now on. The Allies, those rascals, they put mines at Baker Island and didn't send me the memo. Now I've lost a DD ( it sank ) and the CA is having flooding problems so it might go down too. And this broken ship is way out in the middle of no-mans-land and it's going to be a while before it sees the inside of a repair yard. Probably a month to be inside a dry- dock.

A disaster in the making......The Allies have gotten a minefield laid at Palembang. And I have only one undamaged DMS ship left and the broken one is in the repair yard at Saigon for another 6 days yet. So it looks like I maybe should close the harbor at Palembang until I can clear those mines out of there. The undamaged DMS boat is inbetween Guam and Kwajalein somewhere and will be a while getting to Palembang. It was headed for Bataan but Palembang is more important. Another thought would be to just keep sending PB's into the harbor until all the mines are gone.

CRB has about 102K of oil right now. That's all we could haul out of Paley before the minefield shut down the port. I'm going to have to dedicate the TK's to hauling oil from CRB to Pesky Doors and then another route from Pesky Doors to Nagasaki. We'll use the Paley down time to haul CRB's oil for a while. I estimate we will take two weeks to move all 102K to Japan and then we'll have to think of some- thing else to do.

TF 282 is the one I'm bombarding Darwin w/ and so far it's been holding up okay. It's been making trips across the gulf between Babar and Darwin of about two days duration each time and I've got an AO there to refuel the BB cause it can't dock at Babar and there's about 5 AKE's rearming the BB each time it lands in port. Each of those 5 AKE's are holding up good supply-wise and it looks like this operation can continue for quite a while. I'm not sure where the invading troops are going to come from but I've got a candidate on Wake I can move pretty soon. I call it the Mazarati Division because I've forgotten the name of it right off the top of my head. I'll get back to you on that.

Here's the Wake situation. I have too many ground troops there on the ground. I'm exceeding the stacking limits slightly and I have to move somebody off the island. I've decided to move the Mazarati division to see if I can't take Darwin w/ it. I'm not sure Darwin is softened up enough yet but we'll burn that bridge when we get there.

Um....that's part of my restructuring program to try to be everywhere at once. I'm trying to tailor the response to the threat and so far it's been working. Jim is going to torpedo my program by grouping his carriers and then I'm screwed. And I have no earthly idea where his carriers are either. The rest of you guys might want to think twice about separating your carriers that way if I run into a disaster pretty soon, maybe. I've got a lot of picket ships out so I'm not all that worried about him sneaking up on me but so far he's been running some ships to the outlaying islands in his supply chain, which is what I would be doing at this stage of the game. I can imagine that he's trying to get some sort of organization going in his supply chain and my running into his parties regularly is probably upsetting. Sorry about that.

Jim and I have exchanged files and I've watched the movie and here's some fresh combat results: One of Jim's subs has plugged a hole in one of my ships. I mean opened a hole. Whatever. He sank my ship.